Palm Beach Post (Florida)
July 31, 2007 Tuesday
FINAL EDITION
COSTS SOAR FOR IMMIGRANTS SEEKING LEGAL STATUS

BYLINE: By ALEJANDRA CANCINO Palm Beach Post Staff Writer

SECTION: LOCAL; Pg. 1B

LENGTH: 655 words

DATELINE: WEST PALM BEACH

Maricela Hernandez de Escobedo had a smile on her face as she walked out of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services field office Monday. After seven years of waiting, she finally had the interview to approve or deny her permanent resident application. She was approved.

“I am happy,” the LaBelle resident said in Spanish while holding her husband’s hand.

Money was the main reason for her seven-year wait. Achieving a legal status becomes a luxury when a man picks oranges for a living and his wife works in a fruit-packing company.

They were lucky. They got a good tax return this year, which allowed them to finish the process. But Hernandez said a cousin of theirs has been saving for 10 years and couldn’t pay the $395 it used to cost to apply for residency. Now that the price has increased to $1,010, who knows when he will be able to save that kind of money.

Chris Bentley, a spokesman for the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, said the increase will serve to improve operations across the country, by providing better training of employees, better software and a 20 percent reduction in the processing time.

For example, he said, a citizenship application used to take six months to process; it will now take five.

The price for that expediency? A citizen application used to cost $400; as of Monday, it costs $675.

The new fees are a result of a comprehensive review of the costs of processing applications. In essence, Bentley said, the federal agency realized the costs were higher than what they were charging for the services.

Bentley said the last time there was a comprehensive review was in 1998. That year, the fees increased by an average of 70 percent. This year, the fees increased by an average of 66 percent.

Ben Gaspar, a supervisor at the Guatemala Maya Center in Lake Worth, said that while he understands the increase in fees, the federal agency doesn’t take into consideration the people it serves.

He said the county’s Maya community has 15,000 to 25,000 members. Most are illegal and live under the radar. One of the main reasons they don’t legalize their status is money.

“(The agency) is just trying to cover all the ends and someone has to pay for the cost,” Gaspar said.

Bentley said the agency is fee-based. If it costs $1,000 to process an application, then the fee is $1,000.

Ruby Hernandez, an attorney and program administrator for Catholic Charities Immigration and Legal Services, said her organization worked round-the-clock for the past few weeks to get applications in before the fee increase.

“It’s been crazy,” Hernandez said. She had staff members working Saturdays and until 10 p.m. some days last week.

In May of this year, 115,175 people applied for citizenship in the United States, almost twice as many as in April of 2006.

In a survey for the 2005-2006 fiscal year, Hernandez said the Palm Beach Diocese found that there are more than 140,000 people without a legal status in Palm Beach County.

Her organization is only able to help about 20,000 people every year, which means there are thousands more that could apply to legalize their status but don’t have the means.

Some people, she said, come into her office and realize they can’t afford the application fee, the $150 medical exams and the $355 family petition fee. They never come back.

“They don’t have the money to legalize their status even though they have the right to do it,” she said.

But she hopes people don’t feel intimidated by the new fees. “People tend to leave things behind, but when they catch up to them, it’s even more expensive,” she said.

Staff researcher Michelle Quigley contributed to this story.

- alejandra_cancino@pbpost.com

Bigger financial burden to bear

		Old	New
Form	Description	fee	fee
I-485	Application to register as a permanent
	resident or to adjust status	$395	$1,010
N-400	Application for naturalization	$400	$675
I-129F	Petition for an alien fiancé(e)	$170	$455
I-765	Application for employment authorization	$180	$340